Hearing deficiencies can range from partial to complete hearing loss. Often, an individual's hearing ability varies across the range of audible sound frequencies, and many individuals have hearing impairment with respect to only select acoustic frequencies. For example, an individual's hearing loss may be greater at higher frequencies than at lower frequencies.
Hearing aids have been developed to alleviate the effects of hearing losses in individuals. In instances where the individual's hearing loss varies across frequencies, such hearing aids can be tuned to compensate for the unique variations of the individual's hearing loss.
Typically, a hearing health professional performs a hearing test by taking measurements using calibrated and specialized equipment, such as an audiometer, to assess an individual's hearing capabilities in a variety of sound environments. The hearing test can include a variety of measurements, such as, an air conduction test, a bone conduction test, and a speech recognition test. The hearing health professional conduct the hearing test to produce an audiogram or a representation of an individual's hearing loss. Each audiogram includes a detailed report for one of the individual's ears.
Unfortunately, to take calibrated measurements to the level of accuracy required, the hearing health professional must purchase an audiometer system designed specifically with hearing tests in mind. Such systems have pre-calibrated system specific speakers, a bone conductor, an audio card, and audio samples (tone and speech samples). Such systems are often expensive, large, and sometimes difficult to operate. Computing devices, such as a personal computer, are not typically used because of the difficulties in consistently and reliably calibrating the wide range of hardware configurations of available computing devices.
In the following description, the use of the same reference numerals in different drawings indicates similar or identical items.